Chapter One

(A/N): Before we begin, I'm going to put up some disclaimers. This is a fanfiction based on American McGee's Alice - the first game - which, if you played it, you would know that it didn't have much of a storyline. This story has been my attempt at adding depth to the horrific happenings in the first game, and at also creating my own story based on McGee's vision.

This story has nothing to do with the Madness Returns sequel game, so you can't go by the logic of that storyline here because I wrote this wayyy before Madness was released.

This work is long and is very special to me. I started writing it in 2001 and I don't think I finished until 2006, but it was the first twisted fairytale that I wrote and paved the way for me to write more. It was what really got me interested in twisting fairytales, and I have poured everything I had into this work.

Don’t you mess with a little girl’s dream, ‘cause she’s liable to grow up mean…

- Poe, singer/songwriter(Control)

Behind Sanity

Chapter One

1

The closet was old and smelled as if it had housed a dying rat. Similarly, the whole establishment smelled of this horrible stench. The odor of rotting rodent death, along with the smells of blood and urine, flooded the stone prison as if it was a cistern. One could clearly tell that there were much more pleasant places on earth – places where humans were not sitting in corners of tiny cells as they waited for their own bodies to rot. This dreadful place, Rutledge Institute, had been established in 1792, in Daresbury, Cheshire, and though the year was now 1864, few changes had been made since the opening.

Rutledge Private Clinic and Asylum, as it was formally called, was slowly adjusting to the new regulations of patient treatment, but no more at a time than it was forced by law. Not so many years ago, it was no one’s idea to consider that those fragile people of lesser mental stability were truly human beings. There was no way to control them; no way to get through to them. They were all viewed as demon-possessed, treated like animals except by those select few doctors and nurses who thought themselves to have the gift: the power to heal – but few had actually succeeded. Rutledge’s had employed only a handful of such physicians and caretakers over the years, and so it was safe to say that as a general rule, this basic opinion was held as the standard: people who could reason no better than animals were animals. No one person – no matter how gifted – could change this common idea, despite any new type of regulation pressured upon Rutledge’s by the hierarchy. Kindness and decency relied only on a certain few.